5

The Wisdom of Energy: Bringing Emotions to the Path

DZOGCHEN PONLOP RINPOCHE      SHARON SALZBERG

JOHN TARRANT, ROSHI      JUDITH SIMMER-BROWN

 

When people hear about things like nonattachment and mindfulness, they may think they’ll have to give up their emotional life when they become Buddhists.

DZOGCHEN PONLOP RINPOCHE: Losing our emotions or thoughts is not something we need to worry about. When we meditate, they’re still there. They don’t go away. We couldn’t lose them, even if we wanted to!

When you enter the Buddhist path, the point is not to get rid of emotions or thoughts. The important thing is to be mindful of the emotions arising—whether they’re good or bad, or however you might choose to define them. As we progress along the path of meditation, the key point becomes developing a stillness in which we find freedom from the disturbing elements of emotions.

SHARON SALZBERG: The Thai meditation master Ajahn Chah said: “As you meditate, your mind will get quieter and quieter, like a still forest pool. Many wonderful and rare animals will come to drink at the pool, but you will be still. This is the happiness of the Buddha.”

I love the image of the wonderful and rare animals. The stillness is not holding down or repressing any experience. Everything still arrives, but what makes the difference is how all of those wonderful and rare animals are greeted.

Intention and motivation are what’s vital. Why do we act the way we do and how do we relate to our emotions? Do they subsume us? Do they overcome us? Are we propelled into actions we later regret? Do we try to hide emotions or do we denigrate ourselves for our emotions?

So can we find a place in the middle, where we are neither overcome by emotion, which often leads to negative actions and consequences, nor repressing and avoiding our emotional states? That place in the middle, which is mindfulness, is a place of discovery, exploration, and enrichment.

Is the full range of emotion, from rage to passion, included?

SHARON SALZBERG: By practicing mindfulness, we are changing the conditions that will affect what might arise. But it wouldn’t be realistic to say that we assume control over what will arise in our experience. Control per se would not even be desirable, because in the space of rage or passion we can be free nonetheless, and perhaps utilize the energy within those emotions for something more positive in our lives.

JOHN TARRANT, ROSHI: Freedom is just freedom, and it’s either there or not. It doesn’t matter what you’re feeling. In the long arc of a practice, most people do find that they have less intense aversions and so forth. They have less of what you would call disturbing emotions. But it’s also true that when it comes to so-called disturbing emotions, we can ask, who is it disturbing and why is it disturbing? The disturbance is measured against a framework that is illusory. Your disturbing emotions have buddha nature—just as much as your nice calm ones do—and they may actually be more likely to lead to a deeper level of awakening than your nice, calm ones.

In evolutionary terms, biologists talk about emotions as necessary and adaptive, and many psychologists regard emotions as central to who we are. Yet emotions in Buddhism seem to be regarded as a problem.

JOHN TARRANT, ROSHI: It’s true that when people talk about emotion in the Buddhist context, usually they’re talking about something that creates a problem. But what’s wrong with emotion, anyway? An emotion is something that arises because we have a body, an incarnation, and in that realm everything is a little bit imperfect. We can’t get anything quite the way we want it to be, and emotion is the indicator of that. Having an emotion is different from having an emotional problem, which is usually caused by fighting with the emotion, not exploring or having curiosity about it.

JUDITH SIMMER-BROWN: There’s an enormous science in Buddhism devoted to recognizing the experience of emotion. This is quite different from the practice of psychology, which has tended to be heavily interpersonal and management-oriented. However, some psychologists are beginning to appreciate that we can work with the direct experience of our state of mind. That’s a very fruitful way to appreciate that what we call emotion is, at its heart, an energetic experience that doesn’t have to be painful.

SHARON SALZBERG: Emotion is an element of relationship. It is how our awareness relates to anything that presents itself internally or externally. As a manifestation of relationship, emotion can be quite distorted, based in ignorance, so we misconstrue what we’re actually encountering. On the other hand, it can be based in something more truthful and wise and clear, and therein lies the tremendous variety of emotions we experience.

DZOGCHEN PONLOP RINPOCHE: From a classical Buddhist point of view, there’s not really a separate topic we would call emotions. Emotions would appear to be part of the wider topic of kleśas, the mental states or experiences that make the mind unsettled. Emotions can be disturbing and destructive when not experienced with mindfulness and compassion. But if we are able to see clearly what the true nature of the experience is, emotions can have tremendously powerful wisdom and compassion.

JOHN TARRANT, ROSHI: Psychology takes the approach of fixing an emotional problem in order to make a person function again. That may be the goal of a society or a culture, but that is not necessarily the goal of a wisdom tradition. Anybody who has been in any tradition of depth has noticed that people who have what look like pathological emotions might be taking a positive step toward disassembling their old way of being, so that a new, greater possibility can come through. If you’re always fussing at and fixing your mind, you don’t get that journey.

There’s also a kind of voluptuousness about what’s given by the psyche, which at some level is what’s given us by the universe. We can take a housekeeping attitude toward the emotion or we can take the ride and see what discovery is happening. Not a thrill ride, but more of a quest. The problem is not the emotion; the problem is being at war with the emotion or acting out the emotion.

Does Buddhism make a distinction between good emotions and bad emotions?

SHARON SALZBERG: In Buddhism, we think more in terms of what is skillful and unskillful. Skillful refers to those states that, when cultivated, lead to the end of suffering. Unskillful refers to those states that, when enhanced and nurtured, lead to more suffering.

That’s a powerful shift for people to make. Instead of falling into the old, conditioned habit of regarding anger or fear as bad, wrong, weak, or terrible—or considering ourselves bad, wrong, weak, or terrible people for having such emotions—we see them as states of suffering. This is a profound transition. It elicits the possibility of responding to ourselves, and to others in the grip of emotions, with compassion rather than rejection or hatred.

JUDITH SIMMER-BROWN: What we might label in the language of morality as “good” or “bad,” Buddhists would consider as what is more or less conducive to awakening or to compassionate relationship with the world. It is not an external moral judgment of the kind we so frequently encounter.

Emotions themselves become problematic for us because of what we do with them. They can develop into karmic thought patterns that cause greater pain for us or lead us into negative actions. The activity of the emotions has the potential to cause greater confusion, turbulence, lack of clarity, and suffering—or not. Good and bad are clunky words to describe what the meditation experience tells us about emotion. The moral judgment doesn’t fit.

DZOGCHEN PONLOP RINPOCHE: How skillfully or unskillfully we work with emotions determines whether the experience of that emotion is what we call bad or good. It is not about emotions but about how you experience them and handle them. When you experience emotion without skillful means or wisdom, it can be destructive.

The Buddhist teachings present three basic ways of working with emotions. The first approach is mindfulness, which can prevent the destructiveness of the emotions and make them beneficial and useful. The second approach is to bring the emotions to the path of wisdom, by transforming them into something that helps bring benefit to ourselves and others. The third approach, the Vajrayāna approach, is to look straight into the essence of the experience of emotion, where we will find tremendous energy and the power of awakening wisdom.

JUDITH SIMMER-BROWN: One of the things I’ve found most valuable about Buddhist practice is discovering that we don’t really feel our emotions all that often. When there’s an emotional impulse that arises—and I’m talking particularly about the painful ones, the kleśas—we tend to either indulge in it, acting out some kind of catharsis or building an intense storyline around it, or we suppress and bury the emotion. One of the tremendous benefits of Buddhist meditation for me has been to be able to sit with an emotion and experience it, rather than feel I have to do something with it or get rid of it.

DZOGCHEN PONLOP RINPOCHE: The act of releasing and expressing emotion is very temporary. It gives brief relief and a sense of freedom, but the root of your emotions is still there. With meditation, one can get to the root of all the emotions and see the true wisdom within them.

JUDITH SIMMER-BROWN: Our tendency to act on emotions comes from the fact that we’re afraid to feel them. Mindfulness cultivates the ability to fully experience emotions. Emotions are painful when we feel them. The kleśas are genuinely painful. But when we truly feel the intensity of the painful, obsessive, destructive emotions, we deepen our capacity to understand how habitual patterns work in our lives. We get to see how our acting out of anger has caused incredible pain for us and others. Being able to experience my anger fully, and feel the pain before I act, gives me the opportunity to let go, without repeating the habit of releasing the emotions in some kind of fit. The real relief is in letting go.

When we act on our anger, we are actually practicing anger, training in anger. We are deepening and reinforcing the patterns and tendencies by impulsively acting. With mindfulness, we can see the chain we’re caught in, and we can also see the purity at the root of the emotion. To see the alternative is a fantastic relief, not at all like the temporary relief of getting your emotion out.

JOHN TARRANT, ROSHI: I don’t experience expressing emotion as relief. Paying attention is what leads to a transformation. Paying attention is actually the best form of love we have to bring to our lives. If we pay attention, we find freedom, rather than relief. Relief is erecting an alternative fantasy world to live in, until it breaks down too.

DZOGCHEN PONLOP RINPOCHE: And it will!

JOHN TARRANT, ROSHI: Freedom is freedom. Full stop. Freedom can be edgy and scary and surprising and wonderful and all that, but it’s freedom, which is ultimately a more loving and interesting thing than just unloading an emotion.

What about feeling bad and guilty about our emotions, and keeping them bottled up for fear of the negative consequences?

SHARON SALZBERG: When I first learned meditation with S. N. Goenka, I experienced tremendous anger, which I was very uncomfortable with. I marched up to Goenka at one point and said, “I never used to be an angry person before I started to meditate.” But when I got through the distress of facing this newly discovered wealth of anger, I found out that freedom was in recognizing it without shame, without falling into it, without identifying with it.

That’s what real kindness is. We can get caught in thinking that kindness means that we should be complacent and passive. But we’re confusing action and motivation. We cultivate kindness as the basis of our intention, but finding the best action in a particular situation demands mindfulness in a bigger context. That means we could come from a genuinely kind place but have an intensity or fierceness in our actions if the context invites it.

Often our strongest emotions come up with the people we’re closest to.

JOHN TARRANT, ROSHI: It seems you can’t raise a child without making an idiot of yourself. For that matter, you can’t love without making an idiot of yourself. It’s a perfect joining of things. It’s not a mistake.

JUDITH SIMMER-BROWN: I was in a Buddhist-Christian dialogue once, and one of the longtime Trappist monks said with great pride that he couldn’t remember the last time he was angry. I muttered under my breath that he obviously didn’t have a family.

If you create a bubble around yourself and think that having or expressing emotions is a problem, that’s a sad life. Our emotions carry our very best features and they are fundamentally wisdom. Chögyam Trungpa once said that emotions are like a game we started because we just enjoyed them so much, and then they got out of hand. We became afraid of them. But at bottom they are a vivid display of our fundamental wisdom and brilliance. We forget that we created them in the first place, because of all the extra baggage they carry.

It’s a blessing to be in situations that drive you crazy, because it helps you develop a deeper heart. Being a wife and mother has forced me to take greater responsibility for the games I started. These people in my life who push my buttons are my greatest teachers and dearest friends. I’m grateful that I can remember vividly the last time I was angry.

JOHN TARRANT, ROSHI: You meet the surprise and wonder of life as it arises, finding out what instructions life has for you, rather than what instructions you have for managing life.

What is the relationship between mindfulness and Buddhist practices that cultivate positive emotions like loving-kindness?

SHARON SALZBERG: Mindfulness and loving-kindness are so clearly reciprocal and mutually supportive. There are many people whose mindfulness is challenged by a corrosive habit of self-judgment, criticism, and self-hatred. For people like that, loving-kindness or compassion practice actually creates the ground out of which they’re more able to do mindfulness genuinely.

JOHN TARRANT, ROSHI: In kōan practice you find mindfulness practice at times, but also kindness. In the beginning, when somebody starts hanging out with a standard kōan like “The whole world is medicine. What is the self?” they will go through all the usual concentration phenomena, but then they might have some sort of transformation, which is wisdom (prajñā), emerging. At the same time, they may also find themselves kinder. It’s based on wisdom, but sometimes the transformation can start happening in the darkness in a nonrational way. It’s a kind of creative move by the universe that happens when you expose yourself to it.

The truth is that, as you keep going deeper into the meditation path, the categories—mindfulness, awareness, loving-kindness—just slide around. There are fewer boundary lines and categories. Your feet find a path, and the path rises to meet your feet.

JUDITH SIMMER-BROWN: These various elements are mutually supportive. Clear seeing reveals the contrast between habitual patterns and a fresh emotional life, and that allows us to act with loving-kindness in our relations with others. Kindness and attention work so closely together it becomes hard to separate them.

JOHN TARRANT, ROSHI: Loving-kindness is a practice, but if you really pay attention you might find that kindness starts coming up from below. You suddenly find you have a loving attitude toward life. That happens because kindness is not something added to awareness. It’s fundamental to the nature of awareness. The opposition between paying attention and cultivating loving-kindness ultimately falls away.

JUDITH SIMMER-BROWN: The distortion of our clear seeing is part of the painfulness of emotion. We are removed from the direct experience of the way things are. The painful way we experience emotions and our distorted view of reality are completely intermingled.

So if you lose the distortion, you wouldn’t necessarily lose the intensity of emotion, but you experience it differently?

JUDITH SIMMER-BROWN: The energy is completely different without the distortion. Practice helps you see just how much you are caught in your own little house of mirrors, how totally you distort your perspective in the midst of intense emotion.

DZOGCHEN PONLOP RINPOCHE: From the Vajrayāna point of view, we work mostly from the wisdom side of things, but at the same time we employ special skillful means to see the true energy of emotions. Even in the moment when you experience the most destructive emotions, such as rage, if you can penetrate to their essence you find tremendous space and energy, luminosity.

Many of the Vajrayāna practices suggest that we not abandon the emotions but rather work with their pure energy. The pure energy will lead us to a complete state of awakening, because emotions are primordially free. The intensity of emotions has a quality of sudden awakening, right here within the very moment of samsaric experience. From the Vajrayāna point of view, all the practices are directed toward seeing the essence of emotion rather than working with the conceptual or judgmental aspect of mind. We can go beyond that and see the power of the raw and naked state of emotions.

When a surge of emotion comes up, then, it always presents the possibility of awakening?

DZOGCHEN PONLOP RINPOCHE: It’s already in the state of awakening. We just have to discover that. From the Sutrayāna perspective, we think in terms of transforming, whereas in Vajrayāna we don’t need to transform anything. In Sutrayāna, you work with emotions in a more conceptual way. In Vajrayāna, you go straight to the naked state of the emotions, within which we find tremendous space, emptiness, clarity, luminosity, and vividness—what we call the clear light mind. The naked and raw state of emotions has the quality of bliss and emptiness inseparable, which is beyond joy versus agony. It’s self-liberation, self-freeing. Emotions free themselves. We don’t need to free them.

JUDITH SIMMER-BROWN: So there’s nothing to be done?

DZOGCHEN PONLOP RINPOCHE: The problem is, you’re trying too hard. Just relax and enjoy the wild ride.

When we have a strong upsurge of emotion, are there one or two things we can do at that moment to recall the wisdom you’ve all been talking about?

SHARON SALZBERG: One of the first things to do is notice the add-ons. There’s the arising of the emotion, which is its own state, but on top of that we add a future. Or we add a reaction, like shame or exaggeration. Or perhaps we add comparison, by holding ourselves up to an ideal we’re not attaining. So probably the first thing to do is to release some of those add-ons, so we can come back to the original experience. Then we can maybe let ourselves be with the basic emotion in as mindful a way as possible. That will open up a little space, and in that space, we see can options.